The Technophobia design team attended the New Adventures in Web Design conference held in Nottingham, last week, by renowned designer, Simon Collison.
I felt very excited coming away from New Adventures in Web Design conference. Excited because the underlying theme of the majority of the presentations was the importance of giving content the highest priority. Not an afterthought, no designing an interface ready to shoehorn content in at the last moment — au contraire. Content should determine the design, the language used, the size of panels content should fit in, the mood, the emotion and a whole lot more besides.
This post is just a whirlwind overview of the running theme of ‘putting content first’.
The New Language of Web Design
To kick off the day, Dan Rubin brought us The New Language of Web Design. This thought provoking presentation asked us to think about the words we use in our industry. Words are very powerful and we need to think about how we are using language in our industry, what affects it has on our clients and our peers. Web design is a young industry; in an industry’s infancy terminology is confusing. As the industry matures and gains respect, terminology evolves. There are micro-points of pain in vocabulary between designers, developers and managers — imagine this in the medical industry! We have an opportunity as an industry to clean up the language.
A New Canon
Mark Boulton was next talking about a new canon which in sociology means an accepted principle or rule. Mark’s canon consisted of 3 elements:
- Respond
- Connect
- Bind
In this whirlwind tour, all you need to know for the moment is web design should be responsive, it should create connectedness and then it should bind everything together with this fantastic and extremely unique medium we know as web design. When binding, Mark feels we should all follow the rule that there are no edges, there is no canvas and we should design content out not canvas in.
Crafting User Experiences
Sarah Parmenter explained how we can craft user experiences and greatly influence our visitors’ actions by paying attention to:
- Speed
- Simplicity
- Surprise
- Specify
- Stir Emotions
It’s A Journey
Elliot Jay-Stocks described how taking some time exploring print design, and specifically the control he had over typography, and working from the type outwards meant when he came back to producing web design, he tried hard to implement some of the techniques and typographic sensibility on the web.
Art Direction & Editorial Design On The Web: Does It Work?
Greg Wood competently dissected his editorial design work for the web he has been experimenting with on his own blog. He analysed it and showed statistics on how the emotional response and engagement was significantly higher on an art directed article as opposed to the standard page of content.
Language And The Lizard Brain
Jon Tan explained to us the Lizard Brain (Limbic System of the brain) which has a region called the Amygdala. This is where all our emotional reactions occur, and amazingly it has no language. Language is not necessary for emotion. With visual communication and the absence of language we can create emotionally responsive designs.
Once Upon A Time On The Web
Andy Clarke, what a hero. This guy never fails to buck the trends of the web with thoroughly well crafted arguments. This talk focused on emotion and storytelling in web design. We should pay attention to the in-between bits of a user experience. The emotional response, suspense, build-up, anticipation. We can learn a lot from comic book artists on how they tell stories and build emotional responses. It’s a panel size itself that determines how long someone should spend on a particular section.
Content is what makes the web, and it needs to be crafted with the sensibility that it deserves. Content Strategy definitely got legs in 2010. In 2011 I believe it is really going to start growing up. Although the conference didn’t go in to the discipline of Content Strategy, it was certainly encouraging to see that the future of web design will involve a harder look at content, and designing for content rather than putting content in to a framework. We must make it the most important thing on a web site or application and stress to our clients how important it is.
